Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

Alright but spends way too much time on quoting what just a handful of dudes wrote in letters for no clear reason. And in retrospect I'm not really sure it has a thesis beyond "The Jeffersonians existed."



This was mostly just stuff we all kind of heard just being Twitter adjacent after Elon gets involved. Two things that come to mind were that Elon, no matter how much the Twitter veterans tried to dissuade him, was incredibly focused on how accounts with millions of followers use or saw Twitter and struggled to believe Twitter that most people do not in fact see it that way. This explains his bot obsession to me, because it seems he would scroll his replies not realizing that even large accounts that were nowhere near millions of followers never had bots flooding their replies before. (Well, until Elon fixed things.) He did because he was one of the biggest and most active accounts on the site. Also Elon did not himself just move into Twitter and take over, he brought a whole team of cronies who did not gave a shit and even moved in people and his own son to live in Twitter's vacant left over office spaces. (This was before the firings, Twitter had rented tons of office space for more planned expansions in employees they could not afford.) I got the impression that these yes-men may have been behind some of the larger problems because they existed to push Elon's decisions and part of this included making sure that the Twitter veterans could not change Elon's mind on certain things they already knew about. I'd have to read one of these Tesla books to develop my theory but it seemed to me they may exist as a protective layer but functions purely as never questioning Elon. This would also explain why Elon's rate of reversing decisions has picked up once this protective layer returned to Elon's other companies.

As someone closer to Jack's position on free speech versus Elon's the disappointment wasn't surprising to me because I could tell it in what Elon was saying but I think there's actually a more fundamental difference in how they viewed the platform beyond just the free speech aspect. Jack viewed Twitter as something you check maybe a few times a day unless something is happening and then you keep up and hop into the conversation. Elon basically sees it as a group chat but with the entire world that will become his friends. This to me also explains Jack's departure from BlueSky, it's been taken over by people more like Elon, the original Blue Check crowd. While Twitter is big enough to survive with both populations using it in two different ways. (This also means that the problem that threatened Twitter before it sold was that nobody recognized it was actually serving multiple different populations, Facebook is the wrong model because it mostly serves one unified audience. That's why Meta has other platforms.)

edit: Actually one other thing: Elon was (possibly drug-induced) buying so much Twitter stock off the market before it was ever announced or known I'm surprised word never leaked that somebody was buying Twitter stock en masse during that period. Elon suddenly owning 9% was like this huge shock that he had bought so much, but he was buying HUGE amounts every single day for weeks. None of the Twitter watching tech/social media/etc. journalists ever noticed*! Twitter had already had one attempt at a hostile takeover just a few years prior, this is part of why Jack reached out to Elon, they needed a big backer who loved Twitter to block any future activist investors who attempted it again. But Jack didn't tell Twitter he had engaged Elon, so they might not have known to ask if he knew who was doing it! (Elon also convinced Jack not to sell his Twitter stock to Elon, so he's some percentage of the private ownership.)

*and few others because Elon wasn't legally reporting it as required since it seems to be very impulsive how much he was buying, this is known at all because of the lawsuit after he tried to back out of the purchase.  



A fine enough sports book, it's mostly just the history and not too detailed at that. Like a chapter a season maybe. Funniest part to me is a Bill Walton quote from the 1970's where he voices the thing we all saw on Twitter recently where he says it'd be totally okay if a Black man just randomly murdered him because whites have been bad to Blacks before. The more things change...